


Leave the Window Open

by superblackmarket



Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Federico García Lorca - Freeform, M/M, Period Typical Attitudes, new york 1929, spain 1936, various historical figures - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-02
Updated: 2020-09-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:29:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26251945
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/superblackmarket/pseuds/superblackmarket
Summary: “If I die,” Nicolò said to Yusuf, “leave the window open.”It was a sort of joke between them.
Relationships: Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Comments: 96
Kudos: 521





	Leave the Window Open

“If I die,” Nicolò said to Yusuf, “leave the window open.”

It was a sort of joke between them.  
  
 _Si muero, dejad el balcón abierto_ —it came from a scrap of poetry composed by their friend Federico whom they’d met during the Harlem Renaissance the year they spent in New York before the stock market crashed.

Those intermediate periods, though always short-lived, allowed them to play at being the sort of people they might have been, had they not been blessed and cursed with unnaturally long life.

Andromache, Yusuf, Nicolò, and Sebastien had passed a very busy decade since the end of the Great War. They had helped vanquish the decrepit Ottoman Empire alongside Mustafa Kemal, the old foe who had routed them at Gallipoli, but once Atatürk proclaimed the Turkish Republic in its place, Andy grew restless. With Italian imperialism on the rise, they went to Libya, where the so-called pacification campaign was wreaking bloody havoc. The next several years were a blur of violent skirmishes amidst the forested hills of Jebel Akhtar until they died, very publicly, by mustard gas in 1929, and were forced to make themselves scarce again.

None of them had traveled to America since the Civil War, so they agreed to relocate to the City of New York. Once arrived, they drifted apart. Booker found consolation amongst the dissolute drinkers of the Bowery, and Andy—well, Andy was always a bit of a mystery. Nicky and Joe rented a small apartment on West 109th Street from an unassuming landlady and settled into a new existence.

Joe seized the opportunity to study English somewhat obsessively, underlining phrases in the issues of the _New Yorker_ that their landlady had put in a bookcase together with various editions of the Bible, always the New Testament. Nicky found the daylight hours more difficult to fill. He was no artist, no poet, and, though he and Joe sparred daily, he felt tense and agitated all the time. He had a sense of looming catastrophe. 

Nicolò began to suspect, during that summer of ’29, that he’d made some kind of Faustian pact. He didn’t remember having done it, of course, nor did he really believe in the devil, or Goethe, or Marlowe. But something must have happened during his successive rejuvenations, something that explained all the clamorous harbingers of blood and death that filled his head these days. He didn’t know how to communicate these fears to Yusuf, who would laugh at the idea of a diabolical pact.

Only two things quieted his mind. Nicky adored music, and he was utterly smitten with jazz. He dragged Joe out to the clubs almost every night, heedless of the stares his white face attracted. Joe blended in well enough, and Nicky was soon accepted as a benign curiosity. Langston, Nella, and a few of their other new acquaintances spoke French, which offered a lovely reprieve from English.

The second thing that quieted his mind was, of course, sex. There was a certain permissiveness in the air during those hot, smoky nights. He would drag Yusuf back to the apartment for hours of sweaty, gymnastic lovemaking as big band music drifted through the open window. They fucked on the bed, on the floor, in the bath, against the wall, without haste or fear of interruption. Nicolò had no temperance, he wanted it all at once. He would be riding Yusuf’s cock, rotating his hips with maddening slowness, then change his mind, pull off, and slide into Yusuf instead. “Love of my life,” Yusuf said fondly, “you are insatiable.” And Nicolò just smiled like the Mona Lisa and thrust deeper.

When they weren’t fucking or listening to music, when Joe had settled in to draw or study, Nicky took to wandering the streets. He explored the whole city that way, on foot—he seldom took the subway—eavesdropping on conversations, sampling the diverse culinary offerings, perusing old books in dusty shops. Sometimes he dragged Booker along on these excursions to shake the man from his doldrums and give him some variety.

Other days he spent at the hospital with Nella Larsen, who was a nurse as well as an author, and observed the latest advances in emergency medicine. Not for Yusuf or Andromache or Sebastien or himself, of course—their injuries and ailments took care of themselves—but because he had always been the closest thing their little group had to a medic, and he liked to be useful to the people they encountered.

Nicky met Federico at one of the cafés near Columbia, scribbling away at his poems. He took him back to the apartment and introduced him to Joe as a sort of novelty. Federico was a plump, pampered little Spaniard from Granada who, over several glasses of Nicky’s best brandy, virtuously complained about his bohemian life in the big city: swarms of pigeons, buildings under perpetual construction, vomiting multitudes, alienation, solitude. Federico’s parents sent him a hundred dollars each month, which he frittered away in the city bars. Federico liked Harlem and he liked Black people; he also liked Nico y José, as he called them. He took it in good stride when they told him sex was off the table—at least between the three of them—and no, they would not let him observe, regardless of what great poetry might come out of it, odes to Nico’s sea-glass eyes, a sonnet for the Tragic Moor—no, they said, no thank you. 

Federico didn’t speak any English, so Nicolò had the rare linguistic advantage with their new friend. There were few languages that he spoke better than Yusuf, but Spanish was one of them, if only because Spanish and Italian were cognate languages. Federico told Nico that the proximity of Spanish and Italian to Latin and Greek entitled them to a sense of superiority: he believed himself the heir to a noble linguistic past. English, in contrast, was the barbaric bastard son of Latin, constantly gloating over its plundered articles. Nicolò held Latin and Greek in no particular regard, but he was delighted to find someone who loathed English as much as he did.

Federico gifted them copies of his poetry, and after he had gone home, they flipped through the slender volumes, _Suites, Canciones,_ and _Romancero Gitano._ Yusuf thought Federico overindulged his strange metaphors. “Why is he so preoccupied with death?” he wanted to know. “And it’s too picturesque, all the local color—”

Nicolò agreed that the long ballads were bloated and cliché-ridden. But he found some of the short verses strangely haunting. “ _If I die, / leave the window open_ ,” he read. “ _The boy is eating oranges / From my window I can see him / The reaper is reaping wheat / From my window I can hear him / If I die, / leave the window open_. Yusuf, it is chilling.” 

“ _If I die, / leave the window open_.” Yusuf smiled. “Always, my Nicolò.”

“Like that time in Antioch,” Nicolò said dryly, “after I killed you.”

So it became a sort of joke between them.

They saw Federico again a few days later, writing furiously under a tree in Morningside Park. Nicky and Joe exchanged a glance—to approach or not—but Federico saw them first and urgently beckoned them over. Resigned and amused, they went.

They were unaccustomed to having a friend outside their little foursome. Acquaintances, enemies, comrades-in-arms—and Andy certainly availed herself of mortal lovers when the mood struck—but not _friends._ They were never in one place long enough, and the risks always outweighed the benefits. But Federico was a transient, too: he would return to Granada after completing his studies at Columbia, and despite his obvious infatuation with Nico y José and the phenomenon of Nico-y-José—he would have left his mouth and soul between their tangled legs had they ever condescended to let him—Federico had no real expectations of them.

Like many others Nicky and Joe met in the Harlem literary circles, Federico was something of a tortured homosexual. He’d experienced a dreadful falling out with Salvador Dalí before he left Europe and was still deeply resentful. Centuries ago, Nicolò might have commiserated with Federico over misplaced Catholic guilt, but too many years had passed since he’d worshiped before any other altar than his Yusuf. He couldn’t remember what that self-loathing felt like.

Besides, Nicky and Joe had never really thought of themselves as homosexuals, tortured or otherwise. They were far too ancient to concern themselves with _au courant_ psychiatric designations, and it had been more than eight centuries since they’d known any sexuality beyond each other. They felt very sorry for Federico. Or at least they did when he wasn’t behaving like an ass.

Federico always arrived late to things, with his habitual star-on-the-verge-of-discovery arrogance. “I was with Nella Larsen,” he explained, as if to say that he had been frolicking with the King of France. Nicky—who had spent the morning with Nella at Lincoln Hospital in the Bronx, up to their elbows in blood and shit, treating patients with septicemia—did not contradict him, just caught Joe’s eye and smiled faintly.

Federico liked to wax philosophical about Granada. Being from Granada, he said, gave him a sympathetic understanding of all the persecuted peoples of the world.

“Oh, really?” said Joe.

“Certainly, José, mi cariño—sympathy for the Gypsy, the Black, the Jew, and especially the Moor, whom all Granadinos carry within us,” Federico intoned grandly. 

Joe snorted into his beard; Nicky schooled his face into opacity.

Nicolò and Yusuf listened to Federico describe how the Alhambra had been the last redoubt of the noble Moors before they were finally expelled by the Catholic monarchs Isabel and Ferdinand in 1492—they listened, as if they had not been there themselves during the expulsion, helping Muslim and Jewish refugees escape to Aleppo. “A terrible moment,” Federico lamented, “though they teach us the opposite in school. For an admirable civilization was lost, with poetry, astronomy, architecture and delicacy that were unequaled in the world.” He gave Yusuf an appraising glance. “Everything flows, plays, and escapes. It is poetic, musical. A city of fugues without a skeleton.” He paused then. “I must write that down.”

Nicky thought Federico’s greatest virtue was that he always got excited when he grasped a new idea. But then straightaway he would be filled with disillusion; Booker, who only met him once, said _that_ was his greatest virtue.

One night, Federico took them to a bar to see the famous Duke Ellington. Nicky and Joe brought Booker along as well; the Frenchman had been too much in his cups of late. Unfortunately, Booker got drunk as a skunk that night. Nella was disgusted and changed tables before the show began, snubbing them for Langston Hughes instead. Federico found the whole thing wildly entertaining. He was wearing a hideous pair of Bermuda shorts that did nothing for his short plump legs. “Bloody little fairy,” Booker mumbled, with no real malice. 

As the great musician took the stage, Federico applauded so euphorically that, before sitting down at the piano, Duke Ellington tipped his hat and personally thanked him. Federico turned to Nicky and Joe as if to say, “See? The Duke and I are big buddies.”

Booker listened to the whole thing with his eyes closed, or perhaps he just fell asleep. During a break in the applause at the end of the first set, Federico put his mouth close to Booker’s ear and said, “Don’t turn around, the ghost of Bonaparte is behind you.” Booker rose from his chair so quickly that he nearly upset the table. All the glasses fell over, the ashtrays spilled their contents, ice cubes jumped into the air. Federico cracked up. “What made you think Bonaparte could be here?” he demanded between snorts of laughter. “He’s been dead a hundred years, Frenchman.”

The four of them were summarily ejected from the club. Nicky lost his composure, a very rare occurrence for him those days, and cursed out both Sebastien and Federico in half a dozen languages for spoiling the concert. Joe had to drag him home—still spitting epithets in furious Zeneize—and fuck him soundly into the mattress before he got over his ire.

Later, relaxed and sated, he twined his arms around Yusuf’s neck. “Do you think it was a mistake, leaving Sebastien and Federico to their own devices tonight?” he asked.

“Oh, probably,” Yusuf replied. He kissed down Nicolò’s neck, his chest, his abdomen, and Nicolò groaned at the scrape of Yusuf’s beard between his thighs.

He fucked Yusuf’s face slowly, contemplatively, and continued to muse aloud: “The Spaniard is a conceited little shit, but I am fond of him, Yusuf. Do you think perhaps he’ll be a great poet, one day?”

Yusuf hummed around his cock, a noise of ambivalence.

“You are a better judge than I,” Nicolò allowed, breath hitching as Yusuf fondled his balls, “but I think there is something, oh, darkly visionary about his better verses, maybe?” 

Yusuf took his mouth away. “Do you have to talk about the fucking Spaniard while I suck your cock?”

Nicolò smiled. They were both covered in a fine sheen of sweat, slippery as seals. Yusuf’s dark eyes were luminous in the moonlight. They kissed, and spent the remainder of the night overrunning each other’s naked bodies with more aplomb than revolutionary troops in a city that had already surrendered.

Eventually they learned that Booker and Federico had parted ways after another round of drinks at a different bar. Booker would later insist that instead of whiskey, he and Federico had been served hair tonic, because he found himself walking home in a hallucinatory state. En route, someone stabbed him and stole his shoes and all his money; the next morning he woke up unshod and without a dime in a Harlem hospital. He fled before anyone could notice that his wounds had healed of their own accord, and he made Nicky and Joe swear not to tell Andy of his indiscretion.

The summer days waned.

One afternoon Federico summoned Nico y José to listen to some lines he’d been polishing. They weren’t too enthused at the prospect. All summer, Federico had been writing childish verses about loneliness and his frankly condescending admiration for los Negros _._ But this time Federico read a brutal, beautiful prophetic poem about a Viennese waltz. There was a museum of wintry frost, a room with a thousand windows, a forest of dust-dry doves. Nicky was rapt, and Joe was impressed, too: “photographs and white lilies” ended a line he would’ve liked to have written himself, he said.

They took to murmuring fragments of Federico’s poem back and forth to each other as they made love: “ _Te quiero, te quiero, te quiero_ ,” Nicky would croon, taking Joe from behind, plastered to his back, face buried in his neck. “ _Dejaré mi boca entre tus piernas, / mi alma en fotografías y azucenas_ ,” Joe would reply, folding Nicky’s legs over his shoulders as he fucked him tenderly, excruciatingly, “ _y en las ondas oscuras de tu andar._ ”

_I love you, I love you, I love you / I will leave my mouth between your thighs / my soul in photographs and white lilies / and in the dark wake of your footsteps._ They never divulged to Federico all the bedroom mileage they got out of his poem; it would have been too much for the little Spaniard. _I love you, I love you, I love you—_ Yusuf’s tongue deep inside Nicolò— _with the armchair and the book of death—_ Nicolò writhing, tearing at the sheets as Yusuf ate him out— _down the melancholy hallway, in the iris’s darkened garret_ —now Nicolò with his tongue inside Yusuf, tongue and two curled fingers, making him curse and invoke long-dead prophets of long-forgotten religions— _in our bed that is also the moon’s_ —rising and falling, cresting towards completion— _take this waltz that dies in my arms…_

_Toma este vals, el vals del ‘te quiero siempre…’_

Federico’s verses kept them waltzing all night long, and well into morning, too, as summer turned into fall and the leaves changed color.

In the final week of October, a voice on the radio told them that the end was beginning. Nicky had forgotten his dark premonitions and his Faustian dread; now the feeling came rushing back. He and Joe went outside and ran into Federico on the street. The three of them took the subway downtown. When they emerged in the Financial District, they could hear a desperate buzzing, like hundreds of furious bees. Nicky watched the familiar crowds of people hurrying along, but now they seemed to him shadows of people he had known long ago.

When they neared the Stock Exchange, Federico pointed to the sky: a man was leaning out of a window. At that very moment they saw him jump—or, perhaps, only loosen himself, let himself go. The body fell slowly at first, almost a bird suspended in flight. But then suddenly a hat was rolling towards their feet, a shoe was stuck in a sewer vent, a leg separated from the rest of its body, the ginger-haired head shattered on the sidewalk. Federico screamed, gagged, and covered his eyes. A camera flashed. Nicky and Joe looked at each other, stone-faced. Not the end of the world, perhaps, but certainly the end of something.

They supported Federico between them; slowly, they continued walking to get as far away as possible from the crowd, which was now forming a circle around the fallen man. Nicky hoped they hadn’t been photographed.

They made their way back uptown and deposited Federico at his apartment. When they returned to their own, Andromache was waiting for them.

“It’s time to go,” she said.

“Where to, boss?” Joe asked.

“Back across the Atlantic.”

“And then?” Nicky asked.

Andy shrugged. “Take your pick. Berlin. Rome. Madrid.”

Europe, then.

_Hacia la civilización,_ Federico would have said. _Toward civilization!_

They went to Rome.

Nicky regretted that they never got to say goodbye to Federico, though of course their paths would have diverged soon anyway. He had been a rare friend to them, and with the words of his _pequeño vals vienés_ imprinted on their souls, Nicky and Joe were certain that Federico would become a very great poet indeed.

Rome led them to Abyssinia. It was a squalid little colonial war of the worst sort, Italian armies bulldozing across Eritrea and Somaliland, Ethiopian slaves, Abyssinian warlords, Haile Selassie dismembering prisoners of war. After a brief apprenticeship with an eccentric Welsh aviator, Nicky and Joe became pilots. They liberated a plane from an Italian garrison in Benghazi and dropped bombs on whoever happened to be committing the worst atrocities that week. The lines often blurred, and the work was extremely hazardous. In March of 1936 alone, they crawled out of five bloody wrecks. Blinded by fog, deafened by thunder. Lost and low on fuel above the Libyan desert and trackless Ethiopian wastes. Shot down by Italian anti-aircraft guns. Shipped back to Italy in chains, then a few weeks spent in Ventotene Prison, locked up with hundreds of dissidents representing several thousand political parties. “If I die,” Joe said gloomily to Nicky, “leave the window open, won’t you?”

“So much for a united front against fascism,” Nicky complained, after they escaped. “I’ve seen more organization in an alleyful of cats.” 

Reunited with Andromache and Sebastien, the four of them turned next to the Spanish Civil War. They joined the International Brigades in July, mingling with Austrians and Irish and Poles and Czechs and French and Russians and Romanians, all taking up arms against Franco’s Nationalists under the red flag. The world was teetering on the precipice of calamity; Nicolò remembered the days of ’29 and thought of Faust and the devil again.

In August, Nicolò and Yusuf—or Nicolás and José, as they’d become—traveled to Andalusia as spies; they posted up in Granada. Nicolás remarked, a bit wistfully, that it would be nice to see Federico, who had garnered tremendous acclaim as a playwright as well as a poet in recent years. It was impossible, of course; they were posing as Nationalists, and Federico was a public figure with avowed socialist leanings.

Twentieth-century Granada was every bit as beautiful and somber as Federico had described it back in New York, seven years ago now. The hilltop fortress of the Alhambra, unchanged; in the opposite direction, the vega. Jasmine and rose bushes, cypress and olive trees. The tangled streets and whitewashed houses of the Albaicin, the Arab quarter. The mournful sound of church bells at dusk; Federico had claimed there were a thousand of them. The cafés with their marble-topped tables, these days emptied of poets and filled with soldiers.

The black cars of the Guardia Civil, parked at every street corner, made Nicky’s skin crawl with unease. A group of them lounged in a tavern below the Alhambra, talking in loud voices, often punctuated with strident, braying laughter. Then Nicky heard Federico the Poet’s name, and something about an arrest. Slinging his rifle over his shoulder, Nicolás sauntered across the plaza to join the guardsmen.

“Who’s been arrested?” he inquired carelessly in his impeccable Castilian. He accepted the offer of a cigarette and leaned forward so one of the men could light it.

“Lorca, el marica-poeta.” The man struck a match. “Arrested two days ago, executed yesterday.”

“Oh?” Nicolás returned, indifferent.

“That’s right. They blew his brains out with a pistol up his ass.”

“Hm,” said Nicolás, exhaling a stream of smoke. “Made a pretty mess of him, did they?”

“Death squad shot him somewhere along the road to Víznar,” the chatty guardsman said, shrugging. “Much easier to dump a body outside.”

“Indeed,” Nicolás concurred. He thanked the man for the cigarette and strolled away, down the street and around the corner, where José was waiting. Leaning against the fortress, the wall above him inscribed with Arabic verse.

Without emotion or inflection, Nicky told Joe what he had learned.

Then Nicolò di Genova, lapsed Crusader, immortal warrior, ruthless slayer and deadly sniper, turned his head and vomited neatly into a rose bush.

They set off along the road to Víznar after sundown, in a black car of their own. Joe drove while Nicky scanned the roadside, squinting into darkness. It was useless. Dirt, rubble, the odd tree—the whole countryside resembled a mass grave, and he could hardly expect to find their friend’s broken body lying in a ditch. The terrain was bald and terrible; it sickened Nicky that this landscape was the last thing that Federico’s eyes had seen before he died.

They reached Víznar and turned around, back the way they had come.

“Nico…” Yusuf said softly.

“I know,” he said, weary. “Pull over.”

He got out of the car and walked away from the road towards a distant pair of olive trees silhouetted against the night sky. He sat cross-legged under the heavy boughs; Joe settled beside him like a shadow.

“How do I say a novena for dead poet?” Nicky asked eventually. “Federico must have written hundreds of verses about death, but somehow I can’t find the words now.”

“Perhaps because there is nothing to say, my love,” Joe replied quietly, as a tepid breeze rustled through the leaves.

“Federico deserves better than silence,” Nicky sighed, “but all I can think about is how I want to kill the men who murdered him. I want to destroy them, Joe, I want to rip their heads from their bodies, and then I want to kill Mussolini and Franco and Hitler. And then I want you to take me back to Malta and fuck me until my teeth are loose and I’ve forgotten all about Wall Street and death squads and trenches full of dead poets. I am sick to my soul of this century, Yusuf, and it is not even half over.”

The night was warm, almost oppressively so. Joe sat with his back against one of the trees. Nicky straddled his lap, Joe’s hands holding him open as he sank onto his cock, slippery with K-Y jelly. Nicky was too furious, and too despairing, to wait for his body to adjust before he was dragging himself up and slamming back down again. He set a brutal jagged rhythm for them, levering himself up and down with his hands braced on Joe’s shoulders. He didn’t want Joe to touch his cock. His thighs burned with exertion, his eyes stung. He kissed Joe and tasted blood, and suddenly the fury crumbled, leaving only despair. He faltered, sagging against Joe’s chest.

Of course, he didn’t have to ask: Joe was already rolling them over. Nicky’s back hit the dirt, he spread his legs and tipped his head back to give Joe access to his throat. He stared up at the night sky, the stars and the moon. _Te quiero, te quiero, te quiero, / en nuestra cama de la luna._ But the words died in his mouth before the air could leave his lungs.

It wasn’t safe to linger. They adjusted their clothing, trousers yanked into place over skin tacky with lubricant. Nicky spat into his handkerchief and scrubbed at the stain on his shirt—he’d come all over himself. Joe chuckled softly, and Nicky offered him a tiny smile in return. As they walked back to the car, he could feel Joe’s cum trickling down the inside of his leg, a familiar and not altogether unpleasant sensation. He hoped that the dead man, by the grace of god or destiny or karma, might somehow know what they had done. Federico would surely relish the spectacle of Nico y José messily copulating on the spot where they imagined him to be buried, leaving their seed in the wounded earth that had swallowed him whole.

They got back into the black car. Before he turned the key in the ignition, Nicolò looked at Yusuf. “If I die,” he said, very seriously, “leave the window open.”

“Always, my love,” Yusuf replied.  
  


_Si muero, dejad el balcón abierto._

**Author's Note:**

> This is all... vaguely historically accurate. The usual liberties have been taken, but it is true that no one was very straight during the Harlem Renaissance, Nella Larsen was indeed a nurse as well as the inimitable author of "Passing," Federico García Lorca tore shit up in NYC for a year after being dumped by Dalí, then went back to Granada and wrote, among other things, his famous plays Yerma, Bodas de Sangre and La Casa de Bernarda Alba. In 1936 he was murdered by Spanish Nationalist forces for being socialist and/or gay, and his remains were never found. Speed translations of "Despedida" and "Pequeño Vals Vienés" are mine and totally privilege mood over accuracy. All great art can be traced back to Joe & Nicky. 
> 
> Thank you very much for reading this weird, sad bit of historical fantasy. I love to hear from you!


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